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The Ardent

Articles and publications tagged The Ardent across the Atmosphere.

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Kenna Wong Ghaill
Kenna Wong GhaillJul 1, 2026
He Wants to Believe
Aliens exist. At least, they do for Steven Spielberg. This has remained constant across a career defined by restless movement. Spielberg has spent 60 years making films about different subjects, and just as long returning to the same questions.  This fascination reaches back to 1964 in Phoenix, Arizona, when Firelight, Spielberg’s largely lost amateur debut, screened once to a few hundred locals. The reels were lost while on loan to a production studio—or so the legend goes. The film followed th...
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The ArdentFilm Article
Kenna Wong Ghaill
Kenna Wong GhaillJun 2, 2026
Gaysploitation Forever!
Do not let factoids, TikToks, Instagram reels, or neatly packaged retrospectives fool you: gay people have not always been represented in Hollywood, not in any legible way. They were present, of course, most commonly behind the camera. But on screen they flickered in and out like phantoms: suggested and coded, but rarely named. Queer cinema began in the margins.  “Gaysploitation” is one of those terms that exists almost entirely in the margins as well. There is no official entry for it in the ca...
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The ArdentFilm Article
Kenna Wong Ghaill
Kenna Wong GhaillMay 1, 2026
Projecting Power
“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper,” Hollywood’s boy wonder, Orson Welles, casually quips in Citizen Kane. He is about to discover that controlling information means controlling reality, and he will wield it like an infinity stone. He will not report the news—he will author it. Manufacturing public feeling, identifying enemies, galvanizing heroes, and deciding who and what the country will fear and/or love. He learns quickly what kind of power he has found.  Charles Foster Kane was fict...
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Film ArticleThe Ardent
Kenna Wong Ghaill
Kenna Wong GhaillMar 27, 2026
It Is Happening Again
It is happening again. It is happening again. The now iconic phrase first uttered on a Thursday night in 1990. Now repeated ad nauseam through Lynch-coded memes on social media, it first represented the return of a great darkness. A cry for help buried deep inside of David Lynch’s magnum opus. It is happening again. It is happening again. The evil has found its way back. Fritz Lang did not leave Germany because he wanted to. He left because the ground beneath him collapsed, quietly at first, the...
The ArdentFilm Article

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